Settled yet?

The other night Katie announced that she didn't "quite feel settled in Kenya yet mummy". I think her comment was prompted by her desire to have a bedside table and a sense that she hasn't quite nested yet in her room here with some of her favourite things still waiting to find their place. But, coupled with a few other things she prompted me to wonder how settled the rest of us are.

After 8 months of living here the kids and I are now formally resident with stamps in our passports to show it, just in time for my multiple entry visa to expire. This latter means it was almost exactly a year ago that I first visited Nairobi on a whirlwind trip with Tim - it was his final interview for the job and we wanted to see if we thought living here would work for us as a family. Clearly the interview went well and we (with thanks to a few great friends who helped us think through the pros and cons) decided we could happily live here, although I'm still slightly suspicious that we were influenced by the thrill of a couple of nights out without kids or babysitters to think about.

And whilst the anniversary of our decision making trip, formal status here and a bedtime observation from my daughter might anyway have caused me to vaguely reflect on our general state of settledness, it was coffee with a friend a couple of weeks ago that crystallised this theme. This is a very good friend I made soon after we arrived. She too had just arrived with her family and we shared the ups and downs of landing in a new country together, fortified by coffee and occasionally something stronger. Our kids played (and fought) happily for our first few months here and she and I compared notes on our house hunting efforts. We both found houses at the same time and moved in the same week. But we live in different neighbourhoods, with kids at different schools and so we have seen much less of each other as we get increasingly settled in our lives. So we were both eagerly anticipating a long gossipy coffee. But her news was very different to ours.

After 9 months of trying to expand into East Africa her husband's company had decided it wasn't going to make business sense so our friends had been told they would be out of here by Christmas. This position has since changed and our friends (and we) are very pleased that they will now be staying - the kids are so settled here and the family is thriving on the life they are building together. But the challenges of doing business here are very real and impact on Tim too. They will ultimately influence how long there is a role here for him. We've always seen our time here as a temporary adventure and are certainly no way near wanting that to end (which I take to mean we are all pretty settled) but this timely reminder that the adventure might be ended prematurely by others has got us wanting to make sure that we make the most of being here. So Katie now has a bedside table and we've said yes to Matthew's request for his birthday to be at the beach. We are still resisting the daily pleas for a puppy though.



Anne